Here is how The Matt Ahrens Group can help you create the cultural change you are looking for:
1. The Enneagram – The map to understanding!
The Enneagram provides people with a solid theoretical framework to understand themselves and others. It is the foundation we use with all of our clients for professional development and personal transformation. You’ll learn the basics of the system – the nine personality types and their relationship to one another – your type, and before long, the types of others in your workplace including your clients and service providers. Over time, we’ll add intermediate and then advanced level theory to this introduction-level baseline.
2. Professional Applications – Making the theory come alive!
Our Enneagram types are alive within us 24 hours a day; even at work. Sometimes they help us and other times they hinder us. We’ll take a look at your type through the lens of various professional skills and leadership competencies. You’ll learn an organization development model for each, see how the strengths of your type help you in that model, how the challenges of your type derail you at times, and how to use this information to further your professional development. Meanwhile, you’ll also continue to learn more about people of other types and how to work them more effectively.
3. Workplace Relevance – The rubber hits the road with real issues!
Now that you have the skills, put them to use in the workplace. Use the Enneagram to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your entire organization. Work through real conflict. Build high performing teams. Engage in strategic planning. The foundations of the Enneagram and professional applications enhance these activities.
4. Culture Transformation — Becoming an advanced organization
As Enneagram knowledge deepens and spreads in your organization, as the emotional intelligence and professional skills of your employees grows, as the leaders in your organization use the Enneagram knowledge and refined skills to work real business problems, your organizational culture transforms. In this stage we incorporate these new learnings into your standard operating procedures. We implement a strategy that addresses all levels and all areas of your organization.
Expected Results
You’ll begin to see positive results almost immediately! As soon as a person identifies his or her personality type the lightbulbs go on in their heads. Awareness is already building. Properly nurtured, this new awareness becomes the cornerstone of significant personal and professional development over time. As a training session progresses, more and more of these “ah-ha” moments will occur for everyone participating. Some “uh-oh” moments will happen too – as in, “uh-oh, I don’t like that about me” – but that is all a part of the process of building self-awareness and is perfectly natural.
Teams that spend a day in Enneagram training walk away with a greater appreciation of the strengths each person brings to the organization, seeing each other in a new light. Tensions ease, working relationships deepen, team work improves. Profound or subtle, the change is already underway. Participants will remember an enjoyable day of everyone looking at the workplace – and each other – from a different perspective.
Creating Cultural Change
Most significant issues in the workplace are not fixed through a one-day training session or a couple of months of coaching, it takes a commitment over time. Organizations that adopt the Enneagram as a tool of professional development can see results in as little as six months although deeper, more sustaining transformation will occur over the course of a couple of years or more. But this cultural transformation is possible; other organizations have already experienced it.
We help you achieve cultural transformation through additional training sessions with more and more professional applications, learning communities, individual coaching, and working through real workplace issues together.
Getting Started
First and foremost, we focus on your specific business needs. What is happening with your team? What is going on in your organization? After we identify all the issues we will discuss your vision, goals, and objectives.
With that shared understanding in place, we will decide on a course of action. The Matt Ahrens Group offers many services – group training, one-to-one coaching, learning communities, facilitated strategic planning, and more – from which we’ll create a program to meet your specific needs.
Program Delivery
All programs are interactive, experiential, and engaging. New concepts are often introduced with a brief didactic followed by activities that encourage participation, exploration, and idea exchange while respecting boundaries and keeping the environment safe for the participants. Your team will learn as much from each other as they do from the facilitator! The high quality materials support the participants during the session and serve as handy reference material for them later.
We are always looking to improve our programs and make adjustments based on client feedback in the moment as well as between programs. We strive to keep our program delivery quality high and our programs relevant to our clients’ real world situation.
Follow Up
After the program, it is helpful to consider how its benefits could be leveraged for the future. Perhaps add some time into your regular staff meetings for sharing additional insights; keep the learning alive.
Are there other services that might help? After a day of training an entire team, for example, it may help the managers to have a few one-to-one coaching sessions to understand how to best manage employees of different types.
Or, as another example, after completing a company-wide training by department, it might be beneficial to organize a follow-up training program around cross-functional teams. It makes sense to follow a program on Communication with one on Feedback or Conflict. Keep the momentum and maintain the relevancy.
Walking the Talk
The skills that we teach, we use in our own lives, every day! We know from experience how seeing ourselves more clearly can be difficult at first or when we lose presence and slip into a habitual pattern. We also know the sense of well-being that comes from accepting ourselves as we are and taking action that helps further our own development. Bringing the Enneagram into organization isn’t just a service we offer, it is fundamental to the way we do business ourselves.
If you like what you are reading so far, take a look at our services.
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